Italian Metamorphoses

Abstract

The social earthquakes of the 1960s finally activated the self-preserving instincts of the political system, pushing it into a sort of mad race against changes that were imposing themselves spontaneously and anarchically on society. As we have seen, the laws on the regions and the referendum did little more than simply fill a constitutional void of more than twenty years. Yet the reorganization of certain sectors of state industry and public service—while helping rationalize functional mechanisms of the “country-system”—seemed to better serve the parties to which these sectors and services were linked than the “general interest” of the country. This division inspired the journalist Alberto Ronchey, in 1968, to coin a metaphor that would become greatly popular: that of the lottizzazione (parceling out, as in the sale of housing lots) of public property. If the public holding company IRI (Industrial Reconstruction Institute) remained the private hunting ground of the Christian Democrats, the chemical and hydrocarbon giant ENI (National Hydrocarbon Agency) was left to be managed by the Socialist Party, and the EFIM (Agency for Participation and Financing of Manufacturing Industry) was overseen by the other governmental parties, the Republicans and the Social Democrats. Following the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) reform of 1975, the Christian Democrat monopoly was broken; this merely reshuffled the cards.